Dear colleagues, Greg Ragland and I are organizing a symposium on the Evolutionary Impacts of Seasonality at the annual meeting of the Society of Integrative and Comparative Biology (SICB), on Jan 6th 2017 in New Orleans, LA. Organisms living in seasonal environments experience fluctuating selection pressures that influence their ecology and physiology, and drive their evolution. This symposium brings together an international group of seasonality experts in the fields of genomics, physiology, ecology and evolution, working on plants, insects, birds and mammals. We aim to identify emerging areas of inquiry across disciplines and study systems that can most benefit from cross-pollination with other disciplines. A full description and speaker list is below this email. We are seeking contributed oral presentations for a complementary session to this symposium.
Abstract deadline is Sept 1st 2016 (soon!), and abstracts can be submitted here: http://www.sicb.org/meetings/2017/abstracts/index.php To be considered for the complementary session, please select J1: session related to symposium" as your first topic, and then select "Evolutionary Impacts of Seasonality" in the Complementary Sessions drop-down box below. We have funding available for travel grants to help students and postdocs attend the complementary session. If you wish to be considered for a travel grant, please send an application by Sept 1st to Caroline Williams ([email protected]) and Greg Ragland ([email protected]) containing your name, abstract, brief CV, a statement of how participation will advance your career goals (1 paragraph), and a statement of how you support and contribute to diversity in science (1 paragraph). For more information see http://www.sicb.org/meetings/2017/symposia/seasonal.php or contact us. We hope to see you there! Cheers, Caroline and Greg Caroline Williams Assistant Professor | Department of Integrative Biology | University of California, Berkeley Office: 5120 VLSB, (510) 643-9775 | Lab: 5117 VLSB | Skype: caro_williams | cmwilliamslab.com Symposium: Evolutionary Impacts of Seasonality Organisms living in seasonal environments experience fluctuating selection pressures that influence their ecology and physiology, and drive their evolution. Classic work by Dobzhansky and early researchers identified seasonal fluctuations as a potentially important mechanism maintaining genetic polymorphism in natural populations, and studies of seasonal polyphenism and phenology have advanced our understanding of life history evolution. Recent advances in the field are moving towards greater understanding of the impacts of seasonality on genomic and physiological evolution, promising to illuminate the importance of seasonality in generating adaptation and constraining evolution. We thus propose to bring together experts from across these disparate fields, with complementary expertise covering the entire span of the biological hierarchy and the breadth of terrestrial eukaryotes. The goal of this symposium is to identify areas of inquiry across disciplines and study systems that can most benefit from cross-pollination with other disciplines. We aim to produce a roadmap to unifying seasonality research by highlighting transformative research questions emerging from research across organisms, and to suggest how this research can best be integrated, conceptually and quantitatively. Speakers Date: Friday, Jan 6, 2017 Early morning session – Functional and mechanistic responses 7:50am Brief introduction: Caroline Williams and Greg Ragland 8:00am Zachary Cheviron, Assistant Professor, U Montana http://www.chevironlab.org/ Evolutionary systems biology of adaptation to environmental stress: insights from high-altitude deer mice 8:30am Lance Kreigsfeld, Associate Professor, UC Berkeley http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~ljkriegs/ Seasonal control of reproductive function by two, complementary RFamide peptides 9:00am Kimberly Sheldon, Assistant Professor, U Tennessee http://www.biogeographyresearch.org/ The impact of temperature variation on physiology and distributions 9:30am Lauren Buckley, Assistant Professor, U Washington http://faculty.washington.edu/lbuckley/ Local adaptation of development plasticity and seasonal responses to climate warming 10:00-10:30am Coffee break Late morning session – Ecological responses 10:30am Murray Humphries, Associate Professor, McGill Universityhttp://murray-humphries.lab.mcgill.ca/ The seasonal pace of life: environmental drivers of the year-round activity and energetics of boreal mammals 11:00am Øystein Varpe, Associate Professor, University Centre in Svalbard https://sites.google.com/site/seasonalecologygroup/ Life history adaptations to seasonality 11:30am To be advised 12:00-1:30pm Lunch break Afternoon session – Evolutionary responses 1:30am Paul Schmidt, Associate Professor, U Pennsylvania http://sites.sas.upenn.edu/paul-schmidt-lab/ Eco-evolutionary dynamics of seasonal adaptation in Drosophila 2:00pm Marcel Visser, Professor, Netherlands Institute of Ecology https://nioo.knaw.nl/en/employees/marcel-visser The evolution of mechanisms underlying seasonal timing of avian reproduction 2:30pm Kathleen Donohue, Professor, Duke University http://sites.duke.edu/donohuelab/ Predicting the distribution of genotypes associated with phenological cuing in present and future climates 3:00pm Caroline Williams, Assistant Professor, UC Berkeley http://www.cmwilliamslab.com/ & Greg Ragland, Assistant Professor, Kansas State U https://seasonaladaptation.org/ Evolutionary impacts of seasonality: big questions and directions forward
